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In many business negotiations, teams are involved rather than individual negotiators because the negotiation task is generally rather complex (Wilken et al. , 2013). Existing research - in particular, the great many studies that "treat negotiating teams as unitary players" (Halevy, 2008, p. 1)[1] - has established several reasons why teams are also often better negotiators than individuals. For example, teams can spread the workload among multiple team members, have more information processing capacity (Brett et al. , 2009; Cohen and Thompson, 2011) and feel more self-confident than individual negotiators (O'Connor, 1997). For negotiations in which teams face individual negotiators, Thompson et al. (1996) show that teams make more accurate judgments about the other party's preferences through high levels of information exchange, which also enables them to establish agreements in which profits are distributed primarily on their side of the bargaining table (Brodt and Thompson, 2001; Cooper and Kagel, 2005; Hill, 1982; Polzer, 1996).
Therefore, teams are often favored over individual negotiators in various fields of application, such as business-to-business (B2B) contexts (Gelfand and Realo, 1999; Patton and Balakrishnan, 2012; Perdue, 1988, 1989). This is particularly true for teams in which all members pursue the same goals and exhibit a high level of participative decision making (Backhaus et al. , 2008) or within-group cooperation (Keenan and Carnevale, 1989) or a low level of conflict among subgroups (Halevy, 2008).
The current study contributes to this discussion by investigating the use of deceptive tactics as a potential means for teams to reach higher negotiation profits than individual negotiators. The starting point for theorizing is the so-called discontinuity effect (Schopler and Insko, 1992), the "robust finding [...] that groups tend to be more competitive than individuals in mixed-motive situations" (Stawiski et al. , 2009, p. 290). Negotiations often involve mixed motives, such that while there are possibilities to "enlarge the pie" (i.e. to increase the joint profits of both parties), both parties also would try to claim value for themselves (i.e. increase their own negotiation profit) (known as the "negotiator's dilemma") (Lax and Sebenius, 1986). The discontinuity effect implies that teams would engage in tactics that aim at claiming value more frequently than individual negotiators. Negotiators ultimately apply these value-claiming, or distributive, tactics to achieve unilateral concessions...